Is The Institutionalization Of Our Arts A Dead End?

In his essay looking back on Lincoln Center on its 50th birthday, Joe Horowitz suggests that the cultural citadel built optimistically to be a launching pad for the American performing arts, might have turned out instead to be a box canyon.

Perhaps the buildings are to blame: the Met theatre is too big and unwieldy, and Philharmonic Hall and the State Theatre, despite renovations, haven’t worked all that well acoustically. But forget for a moment the physical issues.

While there is an argument to be made for clustering together arts organizations and cultural buildings, the idea has to be animated in some way. Why should these organizations physically be together? Is it about art or about buildings? If it’s about buildings – creating a kind of critical mass of cultural activity that benefits by proximity – then the art comes to be defined by the buildings and how they’re used. The institutions themselves also come to be defined at least in part by their buildings. Build institutions and buildings that are impressive and can be visited and admired and pointed to with pride. That’s how you build the arts, goes the conventional wisdom – build institutions and the physical infrastructure to support them.

Except what if it isn’t?

We live in a time of gathering distrust of institutions. Where institutions were once essential for marshaling resources to accomplish things, we all know that institutions are inherently inefficient. They can be clumsy and broad-stroked. Generic and slow to react. Cautious. Institutions now seem to be at a disadvantage compared to dynamic constantly-reconfiguring networks that can move quickly and nimbly adapt. Increasingly more of the creative energy in our culture is found outside of traditional institutions.

This while much of the arts world is built on an institutional model and many of our biggest arts institutions are locked into facilities that might not serve changing audience tastes or be adaptive to artistic evolution.

There seems to be a consensus that the arts are struggling for relevance and constituency in a crowded contemporary world full of distraction. Many of the efforts to make arts organizations more relevant in recent years have focused on trying to adapt to the digital age and adjusting business models. Data suggest that the arts audience has been shrinking over the past few decades, despite ever-intensifying efforts to expand the arts base. Though most frequently framed as strategic or tactical issues focused on finding more audience, this is at least as much anartisticchallenge as anything else.

What is artistic leadership and where is it today? After decades of preaching inclusiveness and diversity, many in America’s arts community were caught by surprise by November’s election. America’s artists might not, it turns out, reflect the communities in which they work, and a question worth asking is what should the role of artists be in their communities.

Building performing arts centers such as Lincoln Center was a vote for a particular European notion of culture, and set us firmly on the road to the institutionalization of American arts. Perhaps it is that institutionalization that is really the box canyon rather than the cultural campuses themselves. In this new age of collaboration that seems to be animating many fields, maybe performing arts centers reconceived as collaborative artistic spaces rather than joint-tenancies might reinvigorate the idea and produce bolder artistic leadership.

Related

Comments

I worked at one of LC’s constituent orgs 1985-91. In brief my feeling is that it was a good idea to gather the artists, audiences, staffs and donors of some of the US”s best groups in one spot. The constituents still often do great work, and long may they wave. Sixty years later, LC’s most pressing problem is not to find actors, dancers, singers and fiddlers, or even donors, let alone build more infrastructure. It is to find the next generation of audiences. This is urgent. That said, these arts complexes are a mid-20th century idea, a Robert Moses idea if you will. It makes no sense to keep building them – there are a few in the works – even if an admin could gather the elements above, for all the reasons Mr. McLennon mentions.

I agree with Mr. Mosher, especially regarding new audiences; this has been a pressing problem since the time LC was built. I think what is even more problematic today is the ever-decreasing attention span of those being sought as a new audience. I find it hard to picture an audience of millenials staying for all of ‘Long Day’s Journey into Night’, to say nothing of The Wars of the Roses. That may mean a different type of theatre, for example. It is necessary to spend a certain amount of time to enjoy art –whether we as a culture have that time, I am unsure, at best.

Why place absolute values on attention spans? Why expect people in the 21st century to have the drawn-out horse-and-buggy attention span of opera? That contemporary music theater is smaller and more to the point is a sign of progress. Cavernous, industrial-age stadiums like the Met will increasingly become anachronistic as we find our own voice. And in reality, the Met is too big even for the bloated, snail-paced world of opera.

Who is placing an absolute value on attention spans? Even if that is the only option allowed by contemporary taste (which is highly debatable given the popularity of some 24-hour marathon performances where people can choose to come in and out or go in for complete “binge listening”) why should that be the only option for valid performance context? The whole point of the original essay is that we’ve been boxed in by the over-sized institutionality and architecture symbolized by Lincoln Center; why exchange that for another artificial cage? Flexibility of presentation format is what we need, dictated by artistic impulse, not the fleeting tastes of the masses OR the 1%.

At this point, I think it’s debatable that our attention spans have shrunk. As Thomas points out, binge-watching and marathons of one sort another are popular and proliferating. Long-form journalism is hugely valued. People bear down on the things that interest them with a tenacity and obsession that is startling. What I do think has happened is that our abilities to take in information have expanded and become more sophisticated. And given infinitely more choice of what to pursue, we have less tolerance for the things that interest us less. So it may be not that attention spans have shrunk, but that tastes and the sophistication of messages have evolved. Just as they always have…

Sure, we now have minimalist genres, and various long forms in the performing arts, but they are mostly highly marginalized and do not define the norms of the general public. They are also something very different from opera, whose lengths come from an entirely different ethos, so comparing them is specious. If we want something long, we want it long in a modern way, not something based on the long-winded, bel canto bellowing of the 19th century.

But even more to the point, is that attention span is not so much about length, but about the speed at which the material flows. Two hour movies are no problem for the public exactly because they move so much more quickly than opera. If opera and other forms of music theater continue to ignore this problem, they will only hasten their death.

And about binge watching. The shows are based on constantly keeping the watcher in a fast-paced thrall. 24 is a perfect example. The irony is that people will binge these shows exactly because their attention span is so short. They need a constant bombardment of stimulation, the hypnotism of the flickering screen.

And finally, even the term “attention span” contains an implicit judgment that only clouds the issue. It’s not so much about attention span as it is a different concept of time and coming to the point. As noted, people can sit and watch things for hours, but they now have different expectations for how their time will be rewarded.

To be brief as possible about such a wide topic, a few bulleted points:
1. The advantages/disadvantages of centralized arts centers is a fairly old topic. In reality, many of the problems addressed in these comments are not so much about intrinsic qualities of arts centers, but about larger systemic problems that surround them. As is so often the case, these systemic problems remain unaddressed.

2. Both Europe and the USA have arts centers, but in the USA, the tickets are often 3 to 4 times more expensive. And in the USA, the centers are often in dilapidated, if not dangerous city centers while in Europe there is nothing even remotely like these social conditions.

3. A system of funding the arts by donations from the wealthy, or even the upper middle class, creates a form of cultural plutocracy with all the social problems that go with it (such as expensive tickets.) Cultural plutocracy inherently produces cultural elitism.

4. Cultural plutocracy creates the mindset especially apparent at the Met where culture is bought on the international market instead of reflecting locally integrated artistic ability.

5. Cultural plutocracy creates a system of feast and famine where prestigious institutions in a few financial centers receive exorbitant funding while regional organizations are starved to death. Especially in the more expensive forms like opera, cities like El Paso, Atlanta, Albuquerque, Denver, Tucson, San Diego, Los Angeles, and countless others become artistic backwaters totally out of proportion to the size of their populations.

6. The very nature of cultural plutocracy is to create cultural enclaves around the wealthy. This is seen in our communities, and is nowhere more apparent than in our major cities and their suburbs. The Park Avenue mindset poisons America’s cultural life and is directly manifested in places like Lincoln Center.

7. The creation of big arts centers strengthened the parochialism and cronyism that weakens NYC’s cultural life. This is observable in other cities as well.

8. Due to our plutocratic funding system, even huge arts centers in major cities can be impoverished. The Opera House at the Kennedy Center is a travesty in this regard, since it is only used for opera performances about 15 to 25 nights per year. Washington has the 9th largest metro GDP in the world, but ranks 118th for opera performances per year. Los Angeles has the 3rd largest metro GDP in the world, but ranks 133rd for opera performances per year. In fact, the USA only has 3 cities in the top 100 for opera performances per year – a direct manifestation of our funding system.

9. The ABT at Lincoln Center was not more successful at developing American forms than the Met and New York Phil simply due to Balanchine, but mostly because modern dance is more widely accepted than modern music. For many reasons beyond the scope of this comment, ballet has been more capable of meaningful mutation and evolution that modern music.

10. Trump is not a new phenomena. The social and economic problems created by America’s radically unmitigated capitalism have been steadily growing since the Second World War. The arts world made no response and is now suffering the consequences. The result now, of course, will be too little too late from an arts community that no longer even knows how to become politically and socially engaged.

11. One writer notes that opera is moving to smaller spaces, but he does not draw the logical and vital conclusion that this will necessitate modern forms of music theater suited to smaller venues (like black box theaters) that will need to be created by composers. Cheap opera with watered down casts and orchestras is not the solution. That’s just more of cultural plutocracy’s feast and famine syndrome. Some groups call themselves opera companies even though they only use piano accompaniments, which is a ridiculous distortion of what an opera company is.

12. Artists create artistic innovation, while administrators play a relative small role in facilitating activity. So where are the artists among those invited to participate in this discussion? As various writers have noted, the rise of administrators in shaping arts policies has been directly proportional to the weakening of the arts in America. It is time to give artists themselves a greater voice in shaping our society’s artistic visions.

So we see many systemic problems that affect arts centers that are ultimately more fundamental than the problems inherent in arts centers themselves. Dianne is the only one who seems to be concretely addressing these larger systemic problems. Thank you to all the writers for their interesting and stimulating comments.

Why does the art advocate community keep asking the question “what should the role of artists be in their communities”? It not a new question and answer have been provide for decades by philosophy, art history and art criticism.
One of my favorite answers which goes completely against the grain of todays neoliberal language of engagement is Joseph Campbell’s explain about what the source of artistic direction is..

“There’s an old romantic idea, in German, das Volktische. That’s that the poetry of the traditional cultures and the ideas come out of the folk. They do not; they come out of an elite experience, the experience of people, particularly gifted, whose ears are open to the song of the universe. And they speak to the folk and there is an answer from the folk which is then received, there’s an interaction, but the first impulse comes from above, not from below, in the shaping of folk traditions”.

One could take this a step farther. One of the greatest dangers facing the arts today is that too many artists are trying to fit in. In reality, the best artists usually stand apart. Nelson Algren put it this way:

“You don’t write a novel out of sheer pity any more than you blow a safe out of a vague longing to be rich. A certain ruthlessness and a sense of alienation from society is as essential to creative writing as it is to armed robbery.”

Douglas McLennan

I’m the founder and editor of ArtsJournal, which was founded in September 1999 and aggregates arts and culture news from all over the internet. The site is also home to some 60 arts bloggers. I’m a … [Read More...]

About diacritical

Our culture is undergoing profound changes. Our expectations for what culture can (or should) do for us are changing. Relationships between those who make and distribute culture and those who consume it are changing. And our definitions of what artists are, how they work, and how we access them and their work are changing. So... [Read more]

Peter Nelson on Too Many Artists Or Not Enough Value?: “For purposes of this discussion how are we defining "artist"? Are the various creatives involved in the advertising industry, the…” Mar 17, 13:02